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The Summit supercomputer, once the world’s most powerful, is set to be decommissioned by the end of 2024 to make way for the next-generation supercomputer. Over the summer, crews began dismantling Summit’s Alpine storage system, shredding over 40,000 hard drives with the help of ShredPro Secure, a local East Tennessee business. This partnership not only reduced costs and sped up the process but also established a more efficient and secure method for decommissioning large-scale computing systems in the future.

Nuclear physicists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently used Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, to calculate the magnetic properties of calcium-48’s atomic nucleus. 

Scientists at ORNL have developed 3-D-printed collimator techniques that can be used to custom design collimators that better filter out noise during different types of neutron scattering experiments

How do you get water to float in midair? With a WAND², of course. But it’s hardly magic. In fact, it’s a scientific device used by scientists to study matter.

The world’s first exascale supercomputer will help scientists peer into the future of global climate change and open a window into weather patterns that could affect the world a generation from now.

ORNL, a bastion of nuclear physics research for the past 80 years, is poised to strengthen its programs and service to the United States over the next decade if national recommendations of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC, are enacted.

ORNL hosted its annual Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference in person for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Exascale Small Modular Reactor effort, or ExaSMR, is a software stack developed over seven years under the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project to produce the highest-resolution simulations of nuclear reactor systems to date. Now, ExaSMR has been nominated for a 2023 Gordon Bell Prize by the Association for Computing Machinery and is one of six finalists for the annual award, which honors outstanding achievements in high-performance computing from a variety of scientific domains.  

Neutron experiments can take days to complete, requiring researchers to work long shifts to monitor progress and make necessary adjustments. But thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, experiments can now be done remotely and in half the time.

Outside the high-performance computing, or HPC, community, exascale may seem more like fodder for science fiction than a powerful tool for scientific research. Yet, when seen through the lens of real-world applications, exascale computing goes from ethereal concept to tangible reality with exceptional benefits.